


Fearless

by Shadsie



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Based on events in Season 2, Character Study, F/M, For Science!, Hordak perspective, Kindred Souls, Season 2 spoilers, She-Ra Season 2, entrapta is entrapta, not really a romance, not sure what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-08 19:16:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18629596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadsie/pseuds/Shadsie
Summary: It was not a stretch to say that Hordak was completely baffled the first time he met someone who was not afraid of him.





	Fearless

**FEARLESS**  
  
  
Hordak was accustomed to three principal things in life: Mistrust, fear and isolation.  As a conqueror, he knew better than to trust anyone in his employ.  He understood well the precariousness of power and the need to control one’s keys to it.  He did this primarily through fear.  He was a master of intimidation.  The old cyborg understood how to work through carrot and stick – when to offer rewards, when to relent and when to utterly crush someone.  He made sure that every one of his underlings knew intuitively that they could be crushed as easily as they could be rewarded, in fair measure.    
  
Hordak understood the isolation that power brought, as well.  He felt no particular need for companionship, but was well aware of this tendency in others.  This of course made people easy to control.  If a threat to an individual’s life or general well-being failed to motivate them, a threat to someone they cared about surely would.  He did not have the weakness of caring.  The only things upon his personal horizon were power and knowledge.  Here he remained, making do on a backwards planet – one where the entire populace believed that the fading residue of ancient technology was “magic,” no less – without much care for the workings behind it, living off the scraps of a long-forgotten past.  He’d kept a sorceress in his employ, but hardly respected her.  Shadow Weaver was just a pitiful creature consumed with revenge.  It had made her easy to use – until he had no more use for her.   
  
Everyone on this dismal planet knew who he was.  The natives spoke of him in whispers making him into ghost-stories or otherwise treating him as some vague existential fear given a name, even as some of them raised a pathetic rebellion.  Hordak thought it amusing.  They didn’t seem to realize the arrow of history: It never mattered who was “right” or “wrong” or where the supposed “arc of justice” bent. Technologically superior forces always won the wars and history was always written by the victors.  Today’s invader would become tomorrow’s stalwart paragon of Manifest Destiny.  Those among his forces bowed or sometimes cringed in his presence.  While he respected confidence, he could smell the deep-seated terror upon even the most composed of his underlings.  The propaganda fed to the child soldiers in training for his army presented him as something of a patriarch who knew best, the firm-hand needed to break the tyranny of the “Princesses.”  He may have been presented as something of a father-figure for the nation that was the Fright Zone, but he made sure that the image was stern.   
  
Therefore, it was not a stretch to say that Hordak was completely baffled the first time he met someone who saw him in his imposing glory, yet was not afraid of him.   
  
Newly-minted Force Captain Catra had recently picked up a noteworthy prisoner - one of the Rebellion’s Princesses.   
  
Hordak had known of her vaguely.  Rumors of a Princess with unusual skill in invention and an insatiable appetite for technology had reached him, but they had hardly peaked his interest, given how primitive Etheria was compared to the worlds he had known beyond the starless sky.  The people here might as well have just been discovering the plow for the glories he had known.   The small hermit-kingdom she’d been in charge of would fall to his forces one day (and it had after they had obtained the full defection of its ruler) but Hordak had not focused upon it – taking Bright Moon and crushing the obnoxious little rebellion being the foremost thing in his mind.  The Princess had been left behind on the infiltration-mission that had cost him his bargaining-chip with Queen Angella, and she was one that could not be used as a replacement.   
  
Hordak was not stupid.  He realized that the rescue party likely left her behind upon the presumption of her death.  The Fright Zone was filled with dangers.  The commanders made sure their troops knew where the maintenance-hazards and traps were.  The same could not be said for invading Etherians.  He knew that the Princess of Dryl had likely gotten separated from the group and was assumed to have fallen.  Unlike Princess Glimmer, she was not from the Rebellion’s central kingdom and thus did not make as valuable a hostage.  Catra had treated her imprisonment in her own manner before even informing him of it.  He was not upset about this.  Imp, as always, had filled him in on everything. He was intrigued and chose to assess Catra’s style in handling the issue in secret.      
  
This “Entrapta” was an enigmatic creature.   
  
He’d taken her for a mere tinkerer, but he had chosen to see if a tinkerer could succeed where a sorceress had failed him, since Catra had her well under control.   
  
No torture or any kind of threat was needed to coerce the Princess into working for them.  No offers of powers, lands or treasures, either.  He did not pick up any hint of desire for revenge upon her from Imp’s reports. This was curious, indeed.   
  
After Bright Moon had successfully defended itself from Horde-forces, he had called the prisoner-Princess before him alongside the two Force Captains in charge of her keeping.  Hordak noted the smallness of Catra’s pupils as he spoke to her and how the hair on her body was raised a small amount.  He noted the nervous flick of Scorpia’s tail and her stance.  They were trying to remain composed before him, but were filled with fear – as he expected.   
  
His baleful gaze turned upon Entrapta as he spat about the loss of the battle and the team’s utter failure.   
  
Entrapta talked back to him.   
  
She insisted, brightly, that the failure of her project with the Black Garnet was a success because she had gathered data to analyze.   
  
Hordak read her body-language.  There was not a trace of terror on her.  He could not decide whether she was a particularly composed royal (perhaps accustomed to inspiring fear in her own right, and thus one who knew how to play the games of leadership) or if she was a fool.   
  
Either way, he had noted it.    
  
Entrapta was given into the care of Force Captains Catra and Scorpia for as long as she yielded usefulness in her studies.  She was undeniably driven and brilliant – for a native.   She was given free rein to tinker and was, indeed, improving some of the Horde’s hardware.  Hordak let his underlings handle those lesser matters while he turned to his greater ambition:  finding a way to break the dimensional-barrier to bring up portals and communications with Horde Prime.  As long as her curiosity was fed and her defection to their side was maintained, he was content to leave the strange Princess to his minions.  
  
Then he found her one day within his inner sanctum, fiddling with one of his energy conduits without a care in the world.   
  
“Get out!” he roared at her.   
  
She told him that he was blocking her light.   
  
He immediately upgraded his thought-process about her from “conniving royal” to “flat-out fool.”  She was definitely the latter to be here.  He could tear her body to shreds, scattered to the four winds in an instant.  Surely she was aware of this?   
  
Did she not value her life?   
  
Was she…scowling at him?  Entrapta insisted that she just needed a few more minutes. She did not move from her chosen spot until she had apparently finished.  As she was exiting his sanctum, pushed along by her reprogrammed pet battle-drone (a wiser thing than she was) she prattled on about she had replaced the cables he’d been using with insulated ones and that “whatever he was working on” would now be better able to hold a charge.   
  
Intrigued, he turned it on.  She was right.  He beckoned her back inside.   
  
He sized her up.  How small she was – in the physical sense.  Her hair was impressive, but the rest of her was something he saw as a body that would be very easy to break.  Did this creature have any idea how quickly he could crush her bones or wrap just one hand around that thin throat of hers and squeeze the life out of her in seconds?     
  
Perhaps she was like a tiny dog – an overconfident being that thought it had the size and ferocity of a wolf as it glared and yapped.     
  
She didn’t seem fierce.  She spoke at length of her…hobbies, her tinkering.  She spoke of the technology of the First Ones.      
  
Hordak promptly let her know that she was the primitive native of a backwater planet and could not possibly understand what was beyond it.   
  
Her expression lit up.  She begged him to know more.   
  
How was she so fearless?  Entrapta didn’t even speak in formalities – she did not seem to regard him as a superior, but spoke as if she were talking to an equal.  What gall!  She spoke of science and failure and what she’d learned from every mistake she’d ever made.     
  
And to Hordak’s increasing interest and befuddlement, she actually knew what she was talking about.  Her theories made sense and her technical knowledge was beyond anything he’d encountered in all of his time trapped in this lost dimension.     
  
She bounded about, finding things to fix… and things to criticize.  All the while, she did not seem to think of any threat of execution, pain or banishment.   


She looked up to his glowering face with a smile and offered advice – freely and the level upon which she spoke…  
  
Hordak hadn’t experienced this in a long time.   
  
When Catra came to collect Entrapta, he told her to get out.  Ah, the sight and the scent of that familiar cringing fear coming from one that acted all bluster and confidence.  He compared the two – his Force Captain and this malfunctioning Princess.   
  
It wasn’t very long before Entrapta simply perched herself upon the arm of Hordak’s throne as they talked shop.  It became readily clear to him that Entrapta had no ties to anything but science and learning.  He found in her a refreshing sense of purity – no messy, illogical or vague ideals such as “justice.”  She was running upon a completely different code than most, even among those within his employ.   
  
He drew useful personal information out of her.  She had no leverage – that is, no living family to hold against her. Additionally, her former friends had left her, or so she’d first thought.  She said that they’d shared a brief transmission of communication courtesy of Catra.  Her old friends seemed upset when she’d informed them that she had chosen to spend her time with the Horde for the sake of using their tools to make scientific progress and she didn’t seem to understand why.  She seemed to like Catra and Scorpia well enough, but Hordak already had them under his sway.   
  
Much like him, this young woman was utterly alone.  She had nothing to care for but her work – her conquest.  It seemed that Hordak had found someone who would sell their soul for the sake of knowledge.   
  
And someone who could look him in the eye and tell him he was in error about a technical detail.  No terror. No regret.   
  
Hordak’s lips curled over his crimson fangs in a small smile as Entrapta babbled about lost technology buried in ice fields.   
  
He decided that he rather liked this girl.  For the time being, she was useful, and in spite of himself, he had to admire her reckless abandon.    


End file.
